These 17 tales of ridiculous things people had to deal with in the workplace are the best argument ever for working from home

We often feature questions that have gone viral on ‘Ask Reddit’ and the brilliant answers they prompted, and this is one of the best.

It all started when sparklingshanaya asked this of their fellow Redditors.

“What is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever had to deal with at work?”

And the workplace horror stories came flooding in. We’ve read them all – well, quite a lot of them – so you don’t have to, and here are 17 of the best (absolute worst).

1.

‘A coworker screaming at me for leaving food to rot in the shared fridge. It was my first day there and I hadn’t even unpacked my belongings yet.’
idontdigdinosaurs

‘Welcome to the office! We’re like family here!’
oboemily

2.

‘I work in influencer marketing and we hired an Instagram influencer to work on a yogurt brand campaign. As part of the activation we also sent a tie-dye kit and branded swag for them to make tie-dye shirts, hats, etc, with their friends or family.

‘One of the influencers pulled the tie-dye ink out of the t-shirt kit and used it to tie-dye her yogurt bowl, took a video of herself eating it, then shared the video with her followers who ultimately alerted her that you can’t eat tie-dye ink.

‘This was, of course, our fault (the agency) for not being more clear that the tie-dye kit was not edible.’
nanrosenthal

3.

‘I had someone throw a drink at me through the drive-thru window, which is an unwise thing to do to someone standing in front of a shelf of other drinks waiting for the customers behind you.’
JAHNOOSKA

4.

‘I worked in returns at IKEA and had a customer complain that they accidentally ripped the instruction manual in half for the furniture piece they were assembling when they were cutting open the box and couldn’t finish assembling it.

‘I politely informed them that all our instruction manuals were available online in pdf form, but this just made her mad and she wanted to speak to the manager.

‘Manager gave her a few $5 gift cards just to get her off my back but I will always find it so funny that this lady thinks accidentally cutting in half an instruction manual (she had both halves too so she could have just easily put them together to read the instructions) inhibited her from assembling furniture.’
carissadraws

‘I guess if you can’t assemble the manual, then assembling the furniture is simply out of the question.’
on_mission

5.

‘I work at a pet resort/spa. I’m checking in this lady’s dog at like 7 in the morning. Real sweet lady, she has an Australian shepherd. But before I take the dog inside to his kennel for the groomers, she asks me to tell the groomers to separate whatever hair they shave off him into separate ziplock bags based on color and texture.

Turns out she makes jewelry out of her dog’s fur. Later in the day I bring out the dog along with probably 7 little baggies of hair and the lady was very excited.

She gave me a fat tip so I didn’t complain but that’s by far the weirdest request I’ve heard in all my time working there.’
snailsforbreakfast

6.

‘One time my boss saved a hurt goose and put it in a box and made me take it to an animal hospital. Driving down the highway the goose started flapping and got out of the box.

‘I didn’t know what to do and I was scared to grab the goose so I drove the whole way there with a goose riding passenger’
k923f

7.

‘A coworker attempted to prove that you couldn’t actually hurt yourself slipping on a banana peel by stepping on one. After which he slipped and hurt himself.

‘I refused to write it up as an incident. It was too stupid.’
Terytha

8.

‘Intern once thought that he could fax a physical object to the receiving machine. He was trying to fax his belt to a friend.

‘Kid was either an acting prodigy or maybe he needed a life jacket to eat soup. I guess I’ll never know.’
FieldneyRodnerfield

‘Needed a life jacket to eat soup is my new favorite insult.’
Pol4ris3

9.

‘I worked in HR for a nonprofit that hired people who are legally blind. That was the mission.

One day, two employees got into a fight. One was partially sighted, and the other was totally blind, swinging his cane. I had four witnesses to the altercation. However, they were all totally blind, and thus, couldn’t tell me what happened.’
marabou22